


some days i feel your echo

by kalachuchi



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Drinking, Complicated Relationships, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-04 14:14:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21198995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalachuchi/pseuds/kalachuchi
Summary: For Mingyu there was only ever Minghao, even after the coven fell apart. But before the coven came together - before Mingyu had Minghao -Before everything else, Minghao had Jun.or: the love of your lover is not always your friend.





	some days i feel your echo

**Author's Note:**

> written for svt jukebox round 3! inspired by hozier's _work song,_ specifically the lines: _And I was burnin' up a fever / I didn't care much how long I lived / But I swear I thought I dreamed her / She never asked me once about the wrong I did_

Jun’s smiles are bright, all teeth. This is what Mingyu remembers first. 

“Mingyu,” Junhui says. Like he’s trying out Mingyu’s name on his tongue.

“Myungho still talks about you,” Mingyu dodges Minghao’s elbow -  _ Ya, Mingyu!  _ \- with a grin, “Jun.”

_ Jun _ , that’s how he introduced himself. Minghao’s elbow finally makes contact with Mingyu’s side. Mingyu grunts, rubbing at the point of contact. Jun’s eyes follow the motion. Minghao has always referred to him as  _ Junhui. _

The smile stays pleasantly on his face all the while.

It’s something he remembers often, actually, but there’s nothing romantic about it. The memory lies edged with red in his mind, rose-tinted not from time but the sound of Minghao’s voice, holding the moment together. Holding all of Mingyu’s moments together is how it felt, most days. He thinks Minghao would’ve liked to hear that, grin small and satisfied, almost catlike.

_ And when my life ended, I found Junhui. _

Mingyu swallows the memory back down once he remembers that. Minghao never did split his life in two, first then second, the way everyone else often did. He was always a romantic like that.

_ Must’ve had a hell of a good timing,  _ Mingyu whispered against Minghao’s shoulder. Minghao hadn’t liked Mingyu’s mouth where there used to be a pulse, didn’t like the reminder of its absence. Secretly, Mingyu wonders if it ever shattered the illusion, pulling roses from Minghao’s eyes the way Mingyu used to dream about pulling teeth when he first turned. He supposes he’ll never know now.

But Mingyu feels Minghao even now, an echo in his heart that can’t stop throwing itself against the walls of his chest.

For Mingyu there was only ever Minghao.

Even after the coven fell apart. Change not something that comes so easily to people like them, and Mingyu knows how stubborn he gets.

But before the coven came together -  _ before Mingyu had Minghao - _

Before everything else, Minghao had Jun.

After everything, Mingyu sees Jun at a bar. It’s like a movie, Jun charming a boy already clearly wrapped around Jun’s finger. The boy says something and Jun leans in as if to listen smiling all the while, teeth bright.  _ If looks could kill. _

If Jun’s acting - and he must be,  _ has  _ to be, otherwise Mingyu won’t ever forgive him, doesn’t think he wants to even without any of this - then he’s an excellent actor.  _ Junhui likes movies, he’s really good at memorising the killer lines... _

The boy starts moving away from the bar, fingers curled around Jun’s wrist. Jun’s lips parted in a small ‘o’, surprise coloring his features. Eyes almost as bright as that smile, the same as Mingyu remembers. 

Buried somewhere in Mingyu’s chest is a part of him, some piece of him that not even death could kill, and it goes tight as Jun melds into the crowd like another shadow.

And Mingyu doesn’t want to care about it, so he does the next best thing. He looks away. 

But Mingyu’s not very good at not caring, either.

The boy gasps, soundless, and claps a hand over his mouth when Mingyu throws Jun off of him. Eyes wide, Mingyu ignores how fear fills the boy’s eyes instead of shock after looking away from Jun. As if he can’t feel his own blood trailing a line down his throat and into his shirt.

After he sees Mingyu, like Mingyu’s some terrible creature. Like Mingyu’s the one moments away from killing him. Mingyu turns back to Jun. If this is how Jun wants to play after - after everything - then Mingyu can act a monster, too.

“Fuck you,” Mingyu snarls. 

Jun stands from where he’d been sitting on his heels; Mingyu didn’t manage to get him on his knees, at least. “Mingyu,” Jun says, surprised. Then: “You’re looking good.” 

And that pisses Mingyu off, so he lunges for Jun again. As he does, he catches the boy running until he’s beyond Mingyu’s periphery. 

Mingyu thinks he should’ve expected the way Jun dodges this time, smooth and free of wasted movement. So utterly  _ familiar.  _ Mingyu’s anger falls away into something else, something small and demanding and steeped in grief, before Mingyu yanks it back into fury. 

Mingyu’s already sidestepping when Jun sweeps his leg and kicks. This move, too, already known to Mingyu. For all his talk about learning martial arts once, the only style Mingyu’s ever seen Minghao actually put into practice is this one -

\- then Jun ducks and hooks his leg around Mingyu’s ankle as he goes down, turning them over so it’s Mingyu lying dazed on the concrete, blinking up at Jun. Jun’s weight presses against Mingyu’s abdomen as Jun leans in, holding him down as Jun’s arms dart forward to cage Mingyu’s face.

He’s close, heavy. If Mingyu still needed to breath Mingyu thinks it’d hurt, how hard Jun’s holding him down. 

As it is, Mingyu’s already starting to see double. Minghao used to move like this, too. Every motion so deliberately graceful. And Mingyu can see it now, how Jun could take life in exactly the way Minghao once killed to live. Dancer’s silhouette amid violence. 

It shouldn’t be a comfort, finding Minghao in Jun. It shouldn’t feel right. It probably isn’t. 

“Mingyu,” Jun breathes. 

Mingyu sees how blood colors Jun’s smile, the sharp smell of it. He really is too close to Mingyu right now. 

Jun exhales and all Mingyu feels is stale air. 

Hands and eyes trained to follow any movement from Mingyu, Jun leans in.

If there was any truth it would be the ghost of Jun in most everything Minghao did, whether Minghao realised or Mingyu knew to recognise it. Junhui, Minghao’s sire: everything Mingyu remembers of Minghao, Minghao learned following in Jun’s shadow.

So Mingyu kisses him.

When their lips part, Mingyu still tastes a stranger’s blood in his mouth. Jun smiles, eyes red.

“Did you think I was dead, too?”

“You killed him,” Mingyu says. 

It’s Mingyu holding Jun down this time. It’s Mingyu who searched Jun out, hunted after him. 

Jun made it too easy, too simple to satisfy any of the emotions clamoring for Mingyu’s attention, for Mingyu to act on. Flung against the wall of the old estate’s entrance hall, Jun doesn’t fight against the grip Mingyu has around his throat. Accepts a question for what it is. 

Softly, Jun corrects, “I couldn’t keep him alive.”

“You could have.”  _ Shut up, shut up.  _ “You could have. You - ”

Jun’s hand twitches at his side. Mingyu presses more tightly around Jun’s throat, pretends he doesn’t notice Jun’s lack of anger, of bloodlust. Permission absolute in the entirety of Jun’s surrender. 

“ - you didn’t have to let him go.” Mingyu sounds raw, even to his own ears.

Jun’s fingers wrap around Mingyu’s forearm, the touch of his skin neither warm nor cool. His thumb slides up to rest above Mingyu’s pulse point. 

“I didn’t,” Jun whispers, softer than before. Hollower. “I didn’t I didn’t I  _ didn’t.” _

Mingyu feels it, the bob of Jun’s throat under his hand as he speaks. Imagines for an instant the sink of his teeth where his hand traces Jun’s every frantic swallow, increasingly affected. It would be easy, if not painless: the bite to the neck, a path of poison to the heart.

“You found him,” Mingyu echoes, louder and louder. “You found him, you turned him, you - you brought him here and now he isn’t. He isn’t...”

“I brought him here, and then he found you. You already remember the rest.” 

Jun’s other hand joins his first, holding wherever of Mingyu’s arm the first doesn’t reach. He keeps talking, quiet and frantic. “He loved you. He  _ loved _ you. How could I take him away when - how could I.” Pleading, almost.

Mingyu’s head tips forward and against the wall. Jun’s hair whispers by his ear when Jun says at last, “How could I ever have known how to let him go. I didn’t, I can’t.”

Mingyu closes his eyes. Lets his hand drop from Jun’s neck.

Says, “And now you never can.”

Jun laughs, startled, somehow unbearable. The fate of those who live forever is remembering those who sleep without end.

Ironically, Mingyu only notices someone else  _ after  _ breaking back into his own apartment. It’s the familiarity that catches him off guard, though, from the moment he picks the lock of the door to the moment he notices a light from the hall. 

And then, for only a moment, Mingyu imagines.

Minghao picked out their apartment three years ago. “I thought we were sticking together,” Mingyu said, peering into the apartment’s lone bedroom. “Yes,” Minghao agrees, “that’s why I paid our deposit with your account. Curtains or blinds for the ensuite?”

In the present, the bedroom is cold. The curtains swing against the dresser, the window open. Jun sits curled into himself beneath the window, a cat denying itself the comfort of corner to hide.

“I wanted blinds in here,” Mingyu says, surprising himself. 

Jun doesn’t look up.

As if speaking someone else’s words Jun parrots, voice flat. “Blinds cancel out the light more. Only, curtains feel –”

_ Softer on the eyes,  _ neither of them finish. 

“I’ll leave soon,” Jun continues, unprompted. “I didn’t think you’d come back this soon.”

Mingyu drops onto the bed, rests his hands on his stomach. 

“So you would have stayed if I didn’t come back?”

Jun doesn’t answer. Mingyu turns his head to eye the key on one of the bedside tables, twin to his own forgotten at the front hall.

“How did you get in here, Jun?”

Light spills from the window, still open; Jun’s hands small against the dark of his hair where they cover the parts of his head not resting against his knees. The question of  _ why  _ nudges insistently below Mingyu’s tongue, but Mingyu leaves it be. Leaves room for only the simpler of two honesties to be heard. There are certain thresholds best left uncrossed.

“I won’t fight you,” Jun says, “if you’re thinking of throwing me again.”

“Shut up,” Mingyu says. “I’m not getting evicted because you think windows are doors.”

Jun looks up. Mingyu turns to him, forces himself not to turn away. 

Finally, Mingyu scoffs. “What, I’m not worth the charming act anymore?”

Jun blinks. “I never acted that for you.”

“What,” Mingyu says, sitting up, “is that supposed to mean, even.”

Jun sits straighter, as if imitating Mingyu, legs stretching out in front of him.

“He would know. He could always tell. So there was no point. And anyway, you’re already his.”

Mingyu grasps at the sheets, suddenly aware of his the way his teeth press pointedly into his lip where he’s bitten down on it. “Say it.”

Jun just keeps looking at him. Mingyu doesn’t wait for a response.

“Say his name. Don’t just break your way into–,”  _ where he is,  _ “–you can’t even say his name anymore.”

“Neither can you,” Jun answers, suddenly in front of Mingyu. Towering over him, Jun’s fingers a breath away from Mingyu’s mouth, a bracket of space between Jun’s touch and Mingyu’s jaw.

Jun says, “You’re bleeding, Mingyu.”

“You’re not doing anything about it,” Mingyu warns.

Jun’s eyes swim red. They were dark before, Mingyu can’t specify further in the light. He’s never seen Jun with anything but red before.

Mingyu observes Jun a beat longer before he says, “You haven’t been eating.”

“You scared him away,” Jun says. The response of a petulant child, and Mingyu exhales. Thinks,  _ that was months ago,  _ as he yanks the hand hovering close to him until Jun tumbles forward and half onto Mingyu’s lap.

Jun speaks, and his teeth scrape against the junction between Mingyu’s neck and shoulder. 

“Let go.”

“Bite me,” Mingyu quips back. “You clearly need to.”

Jun closes his mouth. The sensation on Mingyu’s skin feels light as air. “You don’t mean that. I don’t want to.”

“Stupid. It’s a joke.”

“I know,” Jun says. Mingyu isn’t sure he does. Then he thinks of Jun’s eyes and decides Jun should be close enough to the edge not to care.

_ This is his blood,  _ he doesn’t say as he holds the back of Jun’s neck and holds until Jun gives in, forces Jun until he drinks.  _ You were in his blood and now you’re all the proof of him I have left. _

Ragged at the end of it, Mingyu decides, “I won’t let you take the easy way out.”   


“What about the easy way in,” Jun questions, pulling free from Mingyu’s hand. He took a lot from Mingyu. Red eyes watch for Mingyu’s response.

“That’s mine,” Mingyu says instead, watching Jun watch him.  _ That’s from me, that’s my blood keeping you alive now. _

Something eventually shutters closed behind Jun’s eyes. Letting nothing out, taking nothing more in.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Jun says.

Mingyu hears the front door click shut on his way out. The key’s gone from the hall is gone when he checks in the morning.

The language of looking back is made not of words but of memory. Body language. 

Mingyu is learning to sight read Jun’s tells - the places Junhui haunts when he pretends he never let Mingyu intersect with his life again, the smile Junhui only shows when he forces himself to maintain the habit of breathing. 

The sound of oxygen that refuses its circuit through Junhui’s lungs when Junhui is below him but not facing him. Never facing him since Mingyu asked once and cannot justify a reason to take back.

A long time ago, too long ago now Minghao said,  _ When I had nobody to speak to I had Junhui. I had Junhui, who understood. _

Mingyu doesn’t acknowledge the memory any more than he accepts the truth of it for himself instead of just something lived through by someone else.

“Ming–” Junhui never finishes the name as he comes. Mingyu bites down as he finishes, blood on his teeth and nobody’s name on his lips. Time still passes and Mingyu holds out in trying to disavow it.

“Minghao wouldn’t either,” Junhui tells him, later. 

Junhui’s back presses against Mingyu’s, tall enough Mingyu feels Junhui’s head lean against the back of his own. Junhui only confesses anything when he isn’t looking at Mingyu directly. Mingyu is beginning to believe it doesn’t mean Junhui isn’t still addressing the words for him.

Mingyu huffs. “Minghao had the sense not to laugh at things that aren’t funny.”

But he still tried, Mingyu knows. Could hear it in the way Minghao spoke of Junhui, can see it in the way Junhui sank against him at his words, tension holding Junhui together until it didn’t.

“This is the first time you’ve said his name,” is what Junhui chooses to comment on.

This is what Junhui is like, for Mingyu. Says one thing while watching something else, something more.  _ It was so easy,  _ Minghao explained,  _ to be with him and not think about the rest.  _ Maybe it was easier then. Mingyu doesn’t think Junhui is the same person he was before.

Mingyu doesn’t think he’s the same as he was, either.

_ With Junhui _ is never just easy, never can be, since it never is  _ just  _ with Junhui. Mingyu doesn’t think it ever will be. Junhui, who leads you in close, who lets you keep holding him by choice. 

There’s a key Junhui wears on a chain around his neck these days, and though Mingyu can’t see it he knows Jun is wearing it now. And whether that was his choice or Junhui’s or something more than either of them together, Mingyu lets it lie.

Closing his eyes, Mingyu lets himself press back against where Junhui’s leaning against him. Then, feeling a hand reach to brush against his hip before moving back away, Mingyu feels something close to understanding or, at the very least, something almost like being understood.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!


End file.
